Book Description

Emilia Pardo Bazan’s place in Spanish and Galician literatures has been hard won, and she has yet to receive the recognition she deserves. In Género, nación y literatura: Emilia Pardo Bazán en la literatura gallega y española, Carmen Pereira-Muro studies the work and persona of this fascinating author in the context of Spanish and Galician competing nationalisms. She re-reads the literary histories and national canons of Spain and Galicia as patriarchal master narratives that struggle to assimilate or silence Pardo Bazán’s alternative national project.

Pereira-Muro argues that Pardo Bazán posited the inclusion of women in the national culture as a key step in circumventing the representational logic behind Realism and Liberalism in the modern nation-state. By insisting that women should be equal partners, Pardo Bazán problematically adopted the patriarchal binarism that assigns women to Nature and men to Culture, but she also subverted it by denying its supplemental relationship. Her astute choice and manipulation of masculine cultural models (Realism, not Romanticism; prose, not poetry; Castilian language, not Galician) ultimately won her—despite fierce opposition—inclusion in the Spanish national canon.Furthermore, the study of her thorny relations with emerging Galician nationalism shows that her exclusion from “Galician literature” was due largely to her transgressive gender performance. Finally Pereira-Muro contends that in the author’s last novel, Pardo Bazán experimented with creating a feminine writing and a feminine canon for Spain. Nevertheless, the prevailing gender politics ensured that only her realist (masculine) production made it into the Spanish canon, and not this last, modernist (feminine) writing.

In conclusion, this book questions the naturalization of national canons by uncovering the gender politics behind what is cast as naturally determined by language and geography.Doing this also exposes the parallel gender strictures at work behind seemingly opposed central (Spanish) and peripheral (Galician) national projects.

About the Author(s):

Carmen Pereira-Muro is from Vigo (Galicia, Spain), and has a licenciatura in Geography and History from the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. She obtained her MA and PhD degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published on questions of gender and nationalism in 18th- and 19th –century literatures, and on other topics related to Emilia Pardo Bazán and Galician literature. She is also the author of Culturas de España. She is currently an associate professor of Spanish at Texas Tech University